The Waters and the Wild
by Mai Thomson
Summary: AU- Natasha & Tony and supporting cast, set during the first Avengers film. Captain America isn't the only team member who is the stuff of legends. He just doesn't know that yet. Alternately, the "Everyone is an ancient magical being, except the people who already have powers. And Clint" AU. WIP. Title from 'The Stolen Child', by William Butler Yeats.


Mai Thomson

The Waters and the Wild

Standard Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers or any of it's characters, due diligence to Marvel Comics and it's affiliates, and to Joss Whedon, lord of all that is wonderful and tragic. I also did not invent the concept of summer and winter Fey, but it's in enough Neo-mythology that I assume it's public domain.

Chapter one - misassumtion and self-delusion

Natasha is older than she looks. This is understood by everyone at SHIELD. She knows they speculate idly about serums and super soldiers and behavioral conditioning. They are wrong, of course.

...

Tony Stark is younger than he looks. That said, he is older even than Natasha, and only she has any idea of how to judge the age of his kind. His face, the real one, is pale like birch-bark, and his eyes are too dark to look into for long. He is younger than he looks, but he is old enough to remember a time when the ice covered the land they live on, and Natasha's people ruled. The first time they meet, he bows his head to her in acknowledgement and the shadows around him curl like spider's legs.

...

Clint has the eyes of a hawk, that's what they tell him. He has better eyesight than is normal for a person, but he grew up around freaks in the circus, and he knows the difference between what can happen by virtue of genetic good luck, and someone who is truly _other. _ He also accepts, has always known, that things are sometimes beyond understanding, and that every now and then it is better not to question. He finds, in a warehouse in east Germany a year after he refuses to shoot her, that when Natasha sleeps her skin is sometimes cold enough to cause frostbite. He says nothing.

...

Nicholas Fury remembers something his mother told him, jokingly, echoing her own grandmother's serious warning. "Never trust a man who always tells the truth. He is never honest, and always up to something." This is part of why he dislikes Tony Stark. He doubts that the man has ever told him a single straight fact, but even going back and reviewing footage of their meetings, he cannot find a single instance of Stark telling an outright lie. The other part, of course is that Stark is an _ass._ A too-powerful, arrogant, flashy asshole with self image issues the size of Texas. He says as much to Phil Coulson, stomping into the other man's office in a fit of pique after Agent Romanov proves unsatisfactory in providing new information, or even embarrassing blackmail material. Phil gives him a blank look and says "Yes, sir." pointedly keeping his eyes directly on Nick's and not glancing at his flaring black coat or the intern in tears visible through the glass door. Nick swears loudly and resolves to find a lieutenant who has the proper respect for his authority as soon as Phil stops being indispensable.

...

Phillip Coulson looks nothing like his father. he looks fairly similar to his Mother's husband, but neither he nor his mother ever mistook his parentage. She whispered the stories to him when he was a child, and he has seen photographs of his sire, with his laughing eyes and golden hair, and had to swallow back bile. He is not unaware of his heritage, but he assumed for a long time that he had inherited none of it. He does not have a garden near his apartment, and does not visit the SHIELD greenhouses. He does not drink, ever. If Agent Hill's Ficus has grown to three times it's natural size and produced brightly colored blooms, all facing his work area, perhaps the shop she bought it from was mistaken about its species. Birds are everywhere in New York. Freak storms happen sometimes.

He understands why Stark rubs Nick the wrong way. He made Phil angry too, purposely and often, and it wasn't until Phil threatened him in the ridiculous beach mansion in Malibu, that Phil realized there was anything more to the man than met the eye. He has heard the stories from his mother, and so he knows something of what waits in the world. He has never heard of something like Stark. He is too much of a realist to hope it is because he is the only one.

Natasha sometimes makes him uncomfortable without doing anything, and she seems to watch him more closely than the other handlers, but he doesn't think much of it. She likes Clint. Coulson is Clint's handler, even when he's assigned to someone else, so it makes sense.

He closes his eyes and purposefully does not see when ice clings to the edges of Clint clothing long after the rest of them have melted and soaked through. He does not see the pale fingerprints on his wrists that fade in the sunlight. He does not see the chilblains on his agent's hands when they run operations in Cape town, Baghdad, Dubai. He has become very, very good at not seeing. The irony of how easy it is to hide this from a man call-signed Hawkeye is not lost on him. Somehow, it fails to make him feel better.


End file.
